A poignant memoir by one of our nation’s most admired African-American women, written with the assistance of journalist Blau. Widow of assassinated civil rights leader Medgar Evers who has herself served as chairwoman of the NAACP, Evers-Williams chronicles her own evolution and turning points, while offering practical advice to readers. Though her tone is occasionally preachy and her prose is a bit uninspired, she offers a glimpse into not only one woman’s struggles, but, indirectly, into those of a nation. When she first married Evers, she not only resented the time he spent away from her but didn—t even share his “zeal for the cause.” For, raised by her paternal grandparents in a professional, middle-class setting, Evers-Williams had been largely sheltered from the poverty and discrimination that devastated the lives of many African-Americans. As the wife of an activist, however, she soon enough was exposed to the blatant racism that poisoned much of the South. At the height of Medgar Evers’s efforts, ominous phone calls and other harassments pervaded their family life. Following the murder of her husband, Evers-Williams fought the good fight as a single mother; her determination to raise her three children in a more humane environment led her not only to civil rights but to human rights in a broader context. Among her many personal triumphs was her success in seeing her husband’s assassin finally convicted decades after the murder. In her 60’s, while nursing her second husband in his final stages of prostate cancer, Evers-Williams rose to the number-one position in the NAACP, helping to save it from numerous financial and political disasters that plagued the organization. Crediting much of her success in overcoming adversity to her deep faith in God, she refers to herself as “still-growing, . . . a work in progress.” Driven by passion, this book instructs and inspires.
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-316-25520-3
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 1998
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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